


walk the razor's edge

by punkrockbadger, shutupkitkat



Series: ram and kaavya's eight for eight [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Desi Potters, South Indian James and Lily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 18:22:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6020278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockbadger/pseuds/punkrockbadger, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shutupkitkat/pseuds/shutupkitkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels like a betrayal of her boys to even live on without them, let alone start to build a life of her own. There is a nasty little voice in her head that says, he wouldn’t try so hard to move on-- and the thing is, she knows it’s true, that if their positions were reversed, he’d dwell on the loss of her, of Hari, to his last breath.</p><p>But she is not Janardhan, and she cannot function like that, living a shadow of a life, walking in the footsteps of ghosts. So she takes a deep breath, and works to make her worst hell into a world she still wants to live in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	walk the razor's edge

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! I'm Kaavya :) 
> 
> This is part two of the collab between Sriram and me. You got your James all on his own, now enjoy some Lily drinking a ton of tea and figuring out life without her husband and infant son. (Warning in advance: it's horrible and sad and I'm sorry for any tears you might shed).
> 
> Oh and-- Happy Valentine's Day from me as well.
> 
> -K

Janardhan hates cabbage curry, which is why Lalitha shoves two heads of cabbage into her cart with a flash of vindictive glee. She feels petty right afterward, but not petty enough to put them back. After all the crap he’s put her through, he deserves some suffering in his life, and what better way to make that obvious to him than by bringing cabbages home? It is a plan for the ages, and boy, is she going to win this argument. 

She’d decided to go grocery shopping partly in order to cool down, and partly because they’d nearly run out of vegetables that afternoon, but by the time the cashier’s finished ringing everything up, she’s worked herself up into full-blown righteous indignation. She loves her husband, she really does, but he’s so good at pushing all the wrong buttons sometimes. It had started out so small, so silly-- Janardhan had made Hari’s bath too warm and he’d screamed for an hour and, of course, she’d had to fix it.

And that was the way things always were-- he would screw up and she would have to clean up his messes. _Sometimes I feel like I’ve married a child!,_ she’d shouted, and the conversation devolved from there. They’d spent an hour screaming insults and accusations at each other, until finally she’d stormed out of the house, too angry to think straight. She’d heard a faint “I love you” yelled at her, as she slammed the door shut, but she’d chosen to ignore it then, and was choosing to ignore it now. She knows just what to say to him now, and so she Apparates back to the house, bag full of cabbage heads in hand, ready to deliver the perfect comeback and end this once and for all, and-- the top floor is gone.

At first, it seems too absurd to be true, and she wonders if her husband’s bad eyesight has become contagious. _How did he screw up feeding Hari this badly?_ , she thinks, a familiar exasperated expression settling onto her face as she wonders what she’ll say to him this time, but then she really thinks about it for a second.

 _O_ _h_ _God,_ she thinks, the cold iron fist of fear grabbing her heart and squeezing it tight _. The top floor is gone._

And then she’s racing through the gaping hole that used to be her front door and up splintered stairs, distantly noting an overturned chair here, a scorch mark there.

Within seconds, she’s standing inside the nursery doorway. The first thing she sees are Janardhan’s glasses, lying broken on the floor. The lenses are cracked, spiderwebs of lines weaving their way through the glass, and-- and---

Her husband, her Janardhan, is lying far too still beside them.

His whole body is strangely limp, his whole posture so _off,_ and he’s staring emptily up at the ceiling in a way that is so very _wrong_ that, for a second, she thinks he’s pulled the worst prank ever. “How dare you!” She wants to yell, and watch his features come alive again, a sheepish grin lighting up his face. But she knows better.

The familiar mischievous glint in his hazel eyes is gone, as if it’s been sucked right out of him by a Dementor, and Lalitha’s gaze travels from his still chest, up his motionless arm, and down the fingers reaching desperately through the bars of Hari’s crib, hoping that the lack of noise from it doesn’t mean what she thinks. Her heart climbs up into her throat as she desperately hopes that her son, her beautiful, darling, loud little boy, is just sleeping, too caught up in some soft, wild dream to wake at the sound of someone entering his room.

But she’s watched him sleep so much, over the past fifteen months, memorized the soft flutter of his eyelashes against his chubby brown cheeks and the way his tiny chest rises and fall evenly with every breath and something is wrong because he’s so still. Her baby, her Hari is defined by motion, by the way he climbs up and down the stairs carefully and runs wild through the kitchen. He’s not moving. He’s too still, and he’s not breathing, and neither is Janardhan. They’re not breathing. They’re _not breathing_.

Lalitha wants to scream but she can’t, she can’t even breathe. It feels like she’s forgotten how, to match her husband and her son. She thinks of Janardhan in his last moments, reaching out to his son, _their_ son. She wonders if he was thinking about her, if he knew how much she loved him, how much she wished that had been the last thing she’d said to him. It was the last thing he’d said to her-- he’d said that he loved her, as the last thing, and what had she done? Her hands are shaking, and she can hardly feel her face, because it feels like there is some awful buzzing building beneath her skin.

In the midst of the panic, she notices one thing-- as always, Hari looks just like his father.

* * *

 She doesn’t know which is worse-- that first realization, or the ones she has a hundred times every day, when she makes plans around the two people-shaped holes in her life. It would be so much better, she thinks, if she carried that around with her constantly, numbing her to the pain.

It’s so sudden when it happens. She’ll glance in a shop window and think about how Hari would love that spinning top, how that shirt would bring out Janardhan’s eyes, and then when she remembers, it’s always as bad as that first time.

When she thinks about them now, she doesn’t let herself think Janardhan and Hari, because somehow, that is all the more painful. They were James and Harry to the Marauders, to the world, and when she mourns them as James and Harry it feels as though she is sharing this burden of grief, she doesn’t have to carry it all alone. But Janardhan and Hari were solely hers, her boys, the loves of her life, and they can only be mourned by her-- and right now she is not strong enough to bear that weight.

It makes everything a little more endurable, for them to be James and Harry and her to be Lily. It’s an act she can put on, just a part to play, and she doesn’t have to think too hard about everything she lost.

People visit a little, in the beginning. Offering consolations and trite words of wisdom alike, things like _It’ll get better_ and _Everything will be alright_ . What’s even worse is the things they don’t say, the spaces between their words when all she can hear is _Thank god it wasn’t me._ People fear death, and though she is alive she is as steeped in death and sorrow as one can be.

There are really only two people she even wants to see, right now. That is not true-- there are four people, counting the two people she actually most wants to see, but can’t. But the two who she can feel just as far away, these days. She cannot bring herself to take that first step, to see them, because more than the living, it would be the empty spaces that would stand out, the sentences left unfinished, the tenses that would start out present before changing to past.

There would be too much silence, Lily thinks, and shelves the issue. Besides, they were his friends first, anyway.

So when Severus Snape shows up at her doorstep, it is almost the last thing she is expecting. 

He is there when she opens the door to grab the morning paper, his hand poised to knock at the door, and when she registers his existence she almost closes the door in his face. She isn’t quite sure, in the end, why she doesn’t-- the lack of human interaction she’s had recently, perhaps, combined with her rather unstable emotional state, along with numerous other reasons-- but, before she really has a handle on the situation, he's in her sitting room with one of her terrible cups of chai James always used to tease her about.

The silence between them is thick, and Lily doesn’t have the energy to break it. There has been too much said between them, throughout the years, or maybe not enough. He’s always been good at breaking things and she’s always been the one to fix them, but for once she doesn’t want to.

“How have you been?” he asks finally, and she has to fight not to laugh at the absurdity of this question. _I’ve lost everyone in this world who I loved the most,_ she wants to say. _I had to cremate my baby son. Can you imagine outliving your son, Severus? How do you think I am?_ But she is too drained, too tired to say any of what she actually feels.

So instead, she gives him a mirthless smile. “Not very well.”

This seems to make him realize the foolishness of his question, and he breaks eye contact and looks down. “Yes, o-of course,” he stutters. “I’m sorry about them." 

And, all of a sudden, Lily is furious because Severus had _hated_ her husband, and he’d never even met Harry. How dare he say these meaningless words to her?" 

“Don’t pretend like you’re actually sorry,” she snaps, and her voice is whip-sharp. Sev- _Snape_ flinches like he’s been slapped across the face. “Why are you here?” she asks finally.

“I just… I wanted to see how you were doing,” he says.

Lily scoffs. “Nothing’s changed since the last time we saw each other. I’m still a mudblood, and we all know how you feel about that, don’t we?”

“I never thought of you like that.” Snape says, after a pause to think. “Not even when we were kids. You were always… You were always just like me.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” She asks coldly. Lily knows what he’s saying, deep down, what he’s about to say, but she doesn’t want that to be it.

“Your father was… He was like Potter, but you were never… you were never like that.” Snape says carefully, as if he is afraid to offend. Little does he know, he is doing more damage like that than he would if he were honest in his intentions. “You were like me, and not… Like Potter was. You know. _Foreign_.” He says, the distaste in his voice a little too obvious, a little too unguarded.

Lily can feel the blood rushing to her face. Layered under Snape’s words, she hears the classmates who would ask her, “so what are you, _really?”._ She sees every confused look from passers-by she would get when she was out alone with her father.

She wants to scream at Snape, hex him maybe, but instead she musters up all the ice in her voice she can and looks him square in the eye. “Get out.”

Snape opens his mouth as though to argue, but something in her face must tell him how close she is to snapping, because instead he nods stiffly and gets up. “If you ever come to your senses, maybe we can talk again,” he bites out, and Lily nearly does hex him for that.

But then he’s gone, and all Lily is left with is the sharp edges of the words he’d spoken and the bone-tired weariness of someone who’d heard the same words thousands of times before.

* * *

Lily calms down soon after Snape leaves. She can still feel the anger thrumming deep inside her, but this is an old anger she has lived with all her life, and it is not in danger of bubbling out of her. And, now that she is calm, she realizes a few things. 

The first is that she can’t continue like this. She can grieve-- she has to-- but this wallowing is not helping anyone, least of all her. She knows that she could continue like this forever, sinking into her sadness until she forgets to feel anything else. And _God_ it would be so much easier than anything else, to live among memories of ghosts. But Lily has never been about doing what was easy, after all. And she wasn’t about to start now.

The second is that she can’t keep thinking of them as James and Harry. That might have been the people they were for the world, but Janardhan and Hari were _who they were_ , and she can’t take that away from them just because it pains her so to remember them in everything they were. She has known this all along, but it had taken Snape trying to erase her, erase Janardhan and Hari’s Lalitha, so callously for her to change.

She starts to make little lists in her head, tiny things she can accomplish because thinking about the reality of a life without them is so insurmountable. _Go three hours without crying. Don’t stay in your pyjamas all day._ _Remember to water the tulasi plant_. She doesn’t think about how if Janardhan were here, he’d tease her for this obsession she’d always had with her plans and her lists.

“En anbe, en uyire.” He’d tease, as he wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, bending down to rest his head in the space between her neck and shoulder. His hair, sticking up in a thousand different directions like usual, would tickle her cheek, and she’d try not to laugh. She can almost feel his fingers tapping some half-remembered rhythmic beat against her hip, can almost feel his breath, warm against the side of her neck. It is hard to remember, sometimes, that these moments with him are just memories. “Ellaathukkume plan poda vendaam.” (My love, my life, you don’t need to plan everything.)

But Janardhan isn’t here to tell her that, so she does, partially out of spite, and partially because she wants to see if he’ll come back, if she plans enough. She knows it is unreasonable-- nothing but a wish, a want, some ridiculous dream that will never come to fruition, but she can’t help but think that, if she succeeds, he might come back, might groan at her again in that melodramatic way of his and make her forget the need for planning entirely.

The first time she tries to go a few hours without breaking down, she thinks about the time her boys once made each other cry by starting a food fight right before lunch on rasam sadham day and ends up choking back tears in the windowless bathroom of a tiny coffee-shop in the first half hour. She can almost hear them calling for her, Hari’s tearful yells of “Amma” interspersed with Janardhan’s “Lalitha!”, and she clamps her hands over her ears like that will change something. There is a part of her that enjoys hearing their voices again, though, a part that is much larger than she’d like to admit, a part of her that doesn’t even want to succeed, because succeeding would mean letting go of them, of her boys.

It feels like a betrayal of her boys to even live on without them, let alone start to build a life of her own. There is a nasty little voice in her head that says, _Janardhan wouldn’t try so hard to move on_ \-- and the thing is, she knows it’s true, that if their positions were reversed, he’d dwell on the loss of her, of Hari, to his last breath.

But she is not Janardhan, and she cannot function like that, living a shadow of a life, walking in the footsteps of ghosts. So she takes a deep breath, and works to make her worst hell into a world she still wants to live in.

* * *

Lalitha has had enough of visitors showing up at her doorstep for a lifetime, and this heavy sense of disgruntlement is what she feels that morning when she realizes that there’s yet another one. But then she opens the door, and-- it’s Remus. He looks tired, she distantly notes, and then laughs internally because they’re _all_ tired, all the way down to their bones. And then she’s smiling so wide her cheeks hurt and maybe crying a little too, because it’s _Remus,_ and finally, she doesn’t feel so alone.

They talk for hours about too many things to count, all the while ignoring the ghosts between them. She asks about Sirius, and learns that he’s a mess, more or less. But he has Remus, and so she knows he will be okay, and she can see that Remus knows this too.

They don’t talk about Peter.

Lalitha has tried not to think about Peter at all, really. She knows, on some level, that he’s still out there somewhere, this man she and Janardhan had loved as a brother. The man who was responsible for the death of her family. But if she allows herself to feel that too deeply, to hold Peter accountable right now, she knows that the fury will be too much for her to bear, and she’s already a mess of emotions even on her best days. One day, she knows, she will want to search him out and find out _why_ he would do this to her. To his best friend. To the little baby boy who had adored him.

But, until that day comes, she is content to pretend that Peter Pettigrew never existed at all.

When Remus gets up to leave, Lalitha panics for a second because she has to say something about everything that’s happened, she can’t just leave it like this. But then he smiles and says “It was really good to see you,” and it’s okay, because he _knows_. Remus has always been good at knowing the words unsaid.

Lalitha smiles. “It was… It was good to see you too,” and it’s the first time in a long time that she’s said that and meant it.

* * *

There’s a letter from Pavi-no, Petunia, Lalitha has to remind herself. She hasn’t been Pavithra for a long time-- since they were kids, really. It says ‘To Lily’ on the envelope, and though Lalitha isn’t surprised, it does sting a little. Petunia has always done her best to erase anything that might make her different, from having a sibling who could do magic to having a parent who wasn’t white.

Lalitha remembers the friends she used to bring home, blonde and blue-eyed with whispered comments and wrinkled noses at the murukku their father would sometimes put out. Lalitha had always hated them and hoped that one day Petunia would realize, too, how they didn’t know her, not really. They loved Petunia but they knew nothing of Pavithra, who was once so proud that her name meant pure, but disappeared somewhere along the way.

But that was the way Petunia had wanted it, and in the end, she’d married one of those friends. Vernon Dursley, someone who was so unlike them in every way possible. So unlike them, in fact, that Lalitha often privately thought that Vernon was inhuman-- he resembled a walrus more than he did any of the other white people she knew.

That had been one of the first things she’d found in common with Janardhan-- an entirely understandable hatred for Vernon Dursley. It had started at that infernal wedding, when Vernon had turned up his nose at Lalitha’s “choice in partner”, even though neither she or Janardhan had even given a thought to an actual relationship, at that point. Of course, she found out much later that he definitely had, but seventeen year old Lalitha was still securely in the dark. 

Once Petunia and Vernon had left them alone, Janardhan had pulled the most hilarious face, a surprisingly accurate imitation of Vernon’s ever present scowl, and had grumbled about drills and “those damn immigrants” for a solid two minutes, to get a laugh out of her. It had certainly worked, and so well that she’d nearly inhaled a quarter of her glass of water, and he’d ended up patting her on the back awkwardly while she coughed loudly.

Lalitha is almost tempted to throw the letter out.

She doesn’t know what it contains, but it doesn’t matter-- she and Petunia weren’t exactly on the best terms. It was probably either vitriol or empty condolences many years too late, which was somehow even worse. But then she reminds herself that after all, this is her sister. The rift between them had grown so great that sometimes Lalitha didn’t even feel like they were living on the same planet, but there was a part of her that had always held out hope that one day they might be on the same page again.

So she opens the letter and finds a cordial, although concise, invitation to tea. Lalitha can honestly say, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is close to the bottom of the list of things she wants to do with her life. She doesn’t want to face Petunia, with her quietly smug satisfaction at the way her life has turned out compared to Lalitha’s. She can almost hear Petunia’s voice. _Look where magic got you. Maybe you were special and I wasn’t, but at least I still have Vernon and Dudley_.

But Lalitha has isolated herself from everyone for so long, and she knows that this isn’t sustainable, not for her. This will be good for her, she thinks.

So she finds herself at her sister’s home at the appointed time. The whole neighbourhood couldn’t be more _Petunia_ if it tried-- the houses are exact copies in precise little rows, lawns trimmed to perfection, not a thing out of place. She stares at the front door for a good minute, psyching herself up to ring the bell. When she does, she has to wait only a second before the door swings open and she finds herself face to face with the sister she hasn’t seen for over three years.

Petunia looks much the same. Her blonde hair is pulled back into a severe bun, and she looks at Lalitha disdainfully. “You’re late,” she pronounces, as if the world should revolve around her, and Lalitha tries her best not to turn around right then and there. She promised herself she would do this, and now that she’s here, she might as well see it through.

 _Hello to you too_ , Lalitha thinks, but puts on an apologetic expression. “There was a lot of traffic.” It’s a joke because of course she’d apparated, but maybe it will lighten the mood a little.

Petunia eyes her suspiciously. “I thought you people didn’t use cars,” she says. 

Lalitha winces internally. She should’ve known it would’ve fallen flat-- Petunia had never been one for humor after all. “Yeah, we don’t, I just… never mind.” She hadn’t missed the usage of _you people_ either. Petunia had the unique talent of making something so innocuous sound like _you freaks_.

There’s a moment where Lalitha stands awkwardly on Petunia’s doorstep, waiting to be invited in. The silence is broken by the patter of little feet and suddenly there is a tiny boy standing next to Petunia, peering up at Lalitha. He tugs on his mother’s skirt. “Mummy, who’s that?”

And then, Lalitha’s heart is in her mouth because this must be Dudley. This is Dudley, and he looks nothing like Hari, with his pale skin and blond hair and rosy cheeks but all she can see when she looks at him is her baby. Her Hari, with his quick smile and always curious green eyes and full, chubby cheeks. Hari, who had just learned to run reliably, and had been doing so at every opportunity. _He will never be this old,_ she thinks, and it’s everything she can do to not break down crying right there. 

Petunia doesn’t seem to notice the look on her face, or if she does, she has the decency not to say anything-- Lalitha is willing to bet it’s probably the former, knowing her sister. “This is your Aunt Lily,” says Petunia to Dudley.

Lalitha forces a smile. “Hello, Dudley,” she says, leaning down to shake his hand. Dudley stares at her outstretched hand and then looks up at her, frowning seriously in the way that only four, almost five, year olds can. She imagines Hari, taller and face a little thinned out, looking at her the same way, and the sudden flash of pain, bright and terrifying, in her chest makes her wonder if her heart really is breaking.

“I don’t like you,” he announces haughtily, his resemblance to his mother heightened for a moment, before scampering off. Lalitha stares after him, startled, before looking up at Petunia, who has the faint traces of a smile. 

“He takes after his father,” she says, and her smile is almost smug. Lalitha thinks about how the first thing people would ever say when they saw Hari was _he looks so much like his father!_ And Hari had-- he had Janardhan’s lazy, easy smile, and their faces were nearly identical, save for the fact that Hari had Lalitha’s eyes. And then, all of a sudden, he was dead, and no one really said much of anything about him anymore.

“Well, I suppose you should come on inside,” says Petunia, as though it is the last thing in the world she wants. Lalitha knows it probably is. She is suddenly very, very tired. This isn’t the delighted reconnection with her sister she’d maybe hoped for-- Petunia clearly wants something from her, and she still doesn’t know what.

She follows her sister into her home, distantly taking in the obsessively neat decor. There’s a wall filled with photographs of Dudley, Vernon and Petunia, in various poses-- professional portraits, casual photos at the beach, birthday parties for Dudley.

Lalitha, Janardhan and Hari had never really been able to take many pictures of all three of them-- after all, they had been in hiding for all of Hari’s life. 

There is a photo from the day Hari was born, of him lying fast asleep in Lalitha’s arms as she rocked him. Janardhan was standing off to the side, looking at them both like he might actually die if he looked away. Anyone could look at it and feel how happy they are, how relieved and hopeful they are, and sometimes, when being in hiding had gotten too tough, Lalitha had dug it out just to remind herself that she felt that way, once. 

And then, there’s a photo of the three of them from Hari’s first birthday party. In it, Hari is laughing as Janardhan tosses him up in the air, arms spread out as if he is trying to fly. She is the one off to the side, this time, looking on with the brightest smile she had ever seen on her face. Lalitha’s heart aches, thinking about it, because, just three months later, two of the people in it were dead. 

Lalitha no longer looks at those photos, because it is too painful. And she doesn’t need to anyway-- she has memorized everything about them, from the curve of Hari’s grin to the sound of Janardhan’s laughter. It is easy to memorize something when you are constantly seeing it play out in your head.

They reach the sitting room before she can sink too deeply into her thoughts, and a voice calls out as they enter, “Oh, Petunia, this must be Lily!” The voice belongs to a well dressed man, his brown hair held flat against his head with so much gel that it resembles a helmet, who obviously has more money than he knows what to do with, and was, judging by the way he was positioned in his chair, conversing excitedly with Vernon Dursley just seconds earlier. Already, not Lalitha’s favorite type of person. “You know, she’s even prettier than you said she was." 

Lalitha blinks at him. “‘She’ is also right here,” she says. It’s an effort to keep her voice pleasant.

“Don’t be rude, Lily,” Petunia scolds. She turns to the man. “Excuse my sister, Nigel. She hasn’t been well recently.”

As annoyed as Lalitha is, she cannot help but want to laugh. ‘Hasn’t been well’? She’d witnessed the aftermath of her family’s murder. _Good old Petunia, always stating the obvious_.

“I’m sorry.” Nigel replies glibly. “Illness is always tough. I’m glad you’re in good health now.”

“Illness?” Lalitha repeats. “I wasn’t--”

“Lily, why don’t you go freshen up before tea?” Petunia cuts in. Lalitha turns to argue, but stops at Petunia’s warning look. “The washroom is down the hall to the left,” Petunia continues, and Lalitha shoves her anger to the side and tries not to storm off.

“Quite a pleasant girl.” She hears Nigel say, down the hallway. “I must say, Vernon, she’s not that bad. I’m glad you and Petunia set this up.” They set this up. The thought makes her sick. This is what Petunia wanted. She should’ve known-- Petunia never did anything without an ulterior motive. Petunia, the schemer, always in possession of a greater plan. Suddenly, Lalitha is thankful for the fact that she used to call her sister Paavi as a child. Sinner was definitely much more of a fitting name for her.

All throughout the horrendously awkward tea that follows, Lalitha does her best to deflect any attempt at conversation from Nigel. Nigel doesn’t seem to realize that he’s ignored, and pontificates on all the subjects Vernon brings up, as if trying to impress her. Lalitha is markedly unimpressed, and, by the end of the visit, she feels like someone’s literally grating at her nerves.

Nigel, who is also on his way out, is horrendously eager to arrange another meeting. “Will I be seeing you again?” He asks, far too enthusiastic given the fact that she’s been trying to project disinterest as much as possible.

Lalitha looks him straight in the eye. “I’m sure my husband wouldn’t like that,” she says coldly.

“Y--Your husband?” Nigel stammers, turning bright red. Good, Lalitha thinks. It feels oddly like it had when she was picking out cabbages, and she files away the thought for later. “I-- I wasn’t aware, I’m sorry. Petunia hadn’t mentioned that you were… spoken for.”

Petunia, on her part, looks as though she has swallowed an entire lemon. “That’s because he’s dead,” she snaps.

“Yes, that’s… that’s…” Nigel looks rather embarrassed, and then all but runs for the door. “Vernon, I’ll see you at work tomorrow. Thank you for having me.” He says, before shutting the front door behind him, and Lalitha can see him striding down the driveway toward a fancy looking car, looking like he’s been punched in the stomach.

Petunia rounds on Lalitha as soon as the door closes. “I can’t believe you were so rude!” she shouts, and then all of the tension and fury that’s been simmering under the surface boils over.

“Rude?” Lalitha repeats. “ _Rude?_ Petunia, my husband and son are dead and my own sister is pretending they never existed! And I’m the rude one for telling him I’m married?”

“Because you’re _not_!” Petunia hisses. “You’re not married, because he’s dead, and you owe it to yourself to move past him. You could do better, and to wreck your life over him…”

“I’m not wrecking my life!” says Lalitha in disbelief. “I lost my family, Petunia! I’m still grieving! And if you loved me at all, if you were a good sister, you’d understand that!”

“Family,” sniffs Petunia derisively. “You knew him for what, four years? He’s not _family._ Don’t be so dramatic.”

“He was more family to me then you ever will be,” says Lalitha, and, with that, Apparates out.

She’s had enough of the Dursleys for a lifetime.

* * *

Lalitha and Remus go out and get coffee or tea together at least once weekly now, because Lalitha’s chai is honestly the worst thing on this planet. She wasn’t just saying that for fun. One time, she’d actually gotten Janardhan sick, and in between rounds of vomiting, he’d sworn that he was never letting her in the kitchen again. To this day, she didn’t know what she’d messed up that time, but thankfully, it hadn’t happened a second time. Or, she thinks, perhaps she just hadn’t had enough time to repeat the mistake.

This is how their meetings usually go-- they sit at a coffeeshop and make up horrible backstories for people that walk by. On his good days, Sirius even joins them, but Sirius’ terrible backstories are always horrible, and not in the good way.

“That man, with the polka dotted tie?” Sirius says, stroking his chin dramatically. He is trying to grow a beard, this week. Lalitha wants to tell him that it looks stupid, but she’s afraid of what he’ll do if she does. Janardhan had had a much better beard, she thinks wistfully. “That’s his only set of clothes.” Sirius pauses for impact, looking around. Neither Remus nor Lalitha look suitably impressed, according to him, because he continues anyway. “His entire family died in a fire, and he wanders the streets in the only set of clothes he has left, searching for justice.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” says Remus. “Why doesn’t he just get new clothes? Or did his bank burn down too?”

“It’s called suspension of disbelief, Remus,” says Sirius with narrowed eyes. 

“More like suspension of all logic,” mutters Remus.

“I think the real question here is what on earth possessed him to buy that tie,” cuts in Lalitha. “It’s hideous.”

“It’s tasteful.” Sirius says, pouting. “I like it.”

“You would,” says Remus with a roll of his eyes.

Hearing Remus and Sirius banter is equal parts amusing and painful. Painful, because Lalitha can hear the empty spaces where Janardhan might have interjected a sarcastic comment or a terrible joke.

It’s strange, sometimes, how they’re only barely twenty-six but have lived lifetimes more than most people ever will. No one ever talks about the aftermath of a war, when all people are left with are the pieces to pick up. Too many of them have been left behind by family and friends alike, and she knows that she is lucky in that not all of them have been able to function in the way she has.

She’s come a long way from the person who broke down in a coffee shop thinking about her boys having a rasam sadham fight. Her grief is more of a dull ache now, that flares occasionally when she sees flashes of Hari in children on the street or notices particularly involved dads at the park, and thinks of how Janardhan would’ve been right there with the best of them, if he’d had a chance. She thinks it will always be like that. She can’t imagine ever not seeing her boys in everything, and she imagines life would be quite lonely, without the little winks and nods from them sprinkled through, like little surprises for her to find. They are playing a scavenger hunt, almost, and she is finding their clues as much as she can, even the ones that break her heart a little.

They’re all a little broken, with jagged edges and missing pieces. And maybe Lalitha will never be whole again. But maybe she doesn’t have to be. Maybe getting up every morning and daring herself to face the world is enough.

Lalitha tunes in again to Remus and Sirius bickering about the stylishness of polka dotted clothing and her shoulders relax as she smiles. This sounds like a good place to start.

* * *

No letter arrives in June of 1991, because there is no almost eleven year old in Lalitha Iyer’s house. 

Lalitha sits in a park and basks in the sun’s slanting rays as the sound of children’s laughter surrounds her. The paai she sits on is just big enough for two, and she can almost see Janardhan sprawled out beside her on the grass mat, sticking his fingers through the gaps in the weaving and laughing as he tells Hari whatever terrible pun he’s just come up with. She doesn’t have to think too hard to imagine Hari-- she knows that he would have been an exact copy of Janardhan at eleven, when she first saw him, all gangly limbs and uncontained energy.

No letter arrives in June of 1991. 

A concerned mother rushes to attend to a toddler who has scraped her knee. Lalitha has to fight not to laugh because Janardhan had always been good at injuring himself, and she can see Hari right now, tripping over his own feet and thin air alike, just like he would have tripped through life. She knows he would’ve always rushed in headfirst to every situation, never thinking about consequences, but it would’ve been alright, because she and Janardhan would have been there to pick up the pieces for him.

It is no longer a burden to miss them, she realizes. There’s a kind of comfort in her grief, now. It’s like an old blanket, familiar and warm, and she can wrap herself in her grief, her memories of what she has lost.

No letter arrives in June of 1991.

No letter was expected.

**Author's Note:**

> I love comments! Leave them here or at [my tumblr](http://www.officialcaviar.tumblr.com).


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